Entertain the idea, for a moment, that Google assigned a quality score to organic search results. Say it was based off of click data and engagement metrics, and that it would function in a similar way to the Google AdWords quality score. How exactly might such a score work, what would it be based off of, and how could you optimize for it?

While there’s no hard proof it exists, the organic quality score is a concept that’s been pondered by many SEOs over the years. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand examines this theory inside and out, then offers some advice on how one might boost such a score.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about organic quality score.

So this is a concept. This is not a real thing that we know Google definitely has. But there’s this concept that SEOs have been feeling for a long time, that similar to what Google has in their AdWords program with a paid quality score, where a page … Read the rest

This week, we launched a feature inside Open Site Explorer that I’m very excited about – the Spam Score Histogram, found by clicking on the “spam analysis” tab:

The histogram is particularly useful for visualizing the distribution of potentially spammy links that show up in a site’s link profile. Above, for example, we’re looking at Moz.com, with a strong distribution of sites that have 0-5 spam flags. According to our research, that means the vast majority of those sites are unlikely to be penalized or banned by Google.

This week, Moz released a new feature that we call Spam Score, which helps you analyze your link profile and weed out the spam (check out the blog post for more info). There have been some fantastic conversations about how it works and how it should (and shouldn’t) be used, and we wanted to clarify a few things to help you all make the best use of the tool.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers more detail on how the score is calculated, just what those spam flags are, and how we hope you’ll benefit from using it.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard.

Click on the image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re going to chat a little bit about Moz’s Spam Score. Now I don’t typically like to do Whiteboard Fridays specifically about a Moz project, especially when it’s something that’s in our toolset. But I’m making an exception because there have been so many questions and so much discussion around Spam Score and because I hope the methodology, the way we calculate things,

Today, I’m very excited to announce that Moz’s Spam Score, an R&D project we’ve worked on for nearly a year, is finally going live. In this post, you can learn more about how we’re calculating spam score, what it means, and how you can potentially use it in your SEO work.

How does Spam Score work?

Over the last year, our data science team, led by Dr. Matt Peters, examined a great number of potential factors that predicted that a site might be penalized or banned by Google. We found strong correlations with 17 unique factors we call “spam flags,” and turned them into a score.

Almost every subdomain in Mozscape (our web index) now has a Spam Score attached to it, and this score is viewable inside Open Site Explorer (and soon, the MozBar and other tools). The score is simple; it just records the quantity of spam flags the subdomain triggers. Our correlations showed that no particular flag was more likely than others to mean a domain was penalized/banned in Google, but firing many flags had a very strong correlation (you can see the math below).

Spam Score currently operates only on the subdomain levelвЂ”we don’t have … Read the rest